Applications of Formal Methods to System Design and Verification

This special issue contains the extended versions of a selected set of paperspose a Hardware/Software co-design and verification methodology based on system dependence graphs. They accept any combination of C/C++/SpecC descriptions as input designs. A system dependence graph shows the dependencies among statements and/or expressions in a design and is used for analyzing and verifying the design, adding parallelism into the designs, and HW/SW partitioning. Lorenzo Capra and Walter Cazzola propose a framework based on Petri nets for keeping functional aspects separate from evolutionary aspects. The authors propose that with this approach they support adaptability, while they keep the model of a system as simple as possible, and preserve and exploit the ability to formally verify system properties. show how to develop suitable designs for e-barter models based on web services using WS-BPEL. An e-barter system is an e-commerce environment where transactions do not necessarily involve money. It is a multi-agent system whose structure reflects a tree of markets and where agents perform exchanges of re